The "Originality in Fantasy Thread" got me thinking about games that do neat things with the standard fantasy races:  dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins (sometimes separate from orcs, sometimes not), trolls, ogres, halfing, gnomes, and the rest of that crowd.  I thought of two examples of interesting twists on standard fantasy races:

1)  Dark Sun: You've got your beardless (possibly obsessive-compulsive) dwarves, your cannibalistic halfing, and your elven desert nomads.

2)  Palladium Fantasy:  The typical "monster races" are much more fleshed out, ready to play--Trolls and Ogres being feasible PCs in a much wider scope of campaigns.  You also see a different spin on Kobolds, where they're master craftsmen, and more resemble a pug-ugly 75% dwarf 25% goblin mix than the D&D lizard-like version.  Goblins are also a lot more sympathetic, ekeing out livings as thieves and bush-league bandits or servants when they aren't out-and-out slaves.  They also gave some reconnection to goblins as faerie folk, giving the "Goblin Cobbler" a few minor sneaky spells and abilities.

So what are some other examples you've seen of games/settings doing something interesting with standard fantasy races?

I personally find the reluctance to depart from standard fantasy races sometimes baffling, oftimes even annoying (casts a glance in the direction of Nyambe... shoehoring in dwarves and elves seemed rather uncomfortable to me.)

On such experiment I consider a success, though, was Green Ronin's Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra. Tolkienesque races really have no place there, but I actually sort of dig how they redefined them in terms of the psuedo-egyptian cosmology, and then expanded the implications from there to explain things like half-races.

I shouldn't pimp my own stuff, but...

Shadowrun's Orxploitation. Nuff said.

I really like what they've done to elves (white necromancy anyone?), gnomes (scheming crafters) and halflings (tribal, dinosaur riding? how cool is that!) in Eberron.

Dark Sun was interesting.

Gemini a Swedish IIRC game that was translated into English (a few poetic oddities in the translation) had the most interesting/unique Elves I've seen for still being mostly "classic" which was that there was a Queen, and the rest were  her children from her various matings--the higher in society you were the more free willed you were but the lower you were the more "hive" minded you were. So they were rather bee like.

Dwarves were warped by blasphemous mutations for some past sin/error.

Gemini is a gorgeous game artistically very moody late middle ages looking stuff. The system wasn't much to speak of but the magic was--very corrupting--to utilize it you had to already pretty much be on the path to damnation.

Runequest/Heroquest plantlike elves (aldrymi?) and machine like/golemesque Dwarves (mostali?) were also quite interesting but a bit far from classic fantasy versions (so much so that the usage of Elf and Dwarf are pretty inaccurate for general usage.)

Quote from: JongWKI shouldn't pimp my own stuff, but...

While I, on the other hand, don't visit a forum without the specific goal of pimping my own stuff.

Uresia's Birah Elves, for that ... Elves made into nature's bitch, instead of poncing around in harmony with anything

Another ditto post.  Dark Sun was pretty freaking cool.

I like what Clinton did with Elves and Goblins in The Shadow of Yesterday.  Some neat stuff in there about how they view the world and how they came to be.

That said, I generally prefer games where there are no "weird" races.